The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is recommending that financial companies pool their infrastructure resources and work together to fight the increasing level of cybersecurity threats.
According to a report in the technology trade magazine Computerworld, the DHS response follows a fourth week of distributed denial-of-service attacks against major U.S. banks. Mark Weatherford, DHS deputy undersecretary for cybersecurity, told a cybersecurity awareness conference in Santa Clara, Calif., that financial institutions should consider working together to create ‘a co-op kind of model’ where Internet service providers can buy more servers than any single company might need and then ‘co-op that for like-minded organizations’ in the event that extra server capacity could be immediately available. However, Weatherford adds that he had ‘no idea’ if such a scheme was viable or even legal.
‘This has been an eye-opening experience,’ says Weatherford about the depth of cyber attacks being orchestrated against U.S. financial institutions by a hacker group identifying itself as an Iranian-based Islamic militant organization.